Elsie, the protagonist of WRECK AND ORDER, is the kind of character who, if she was your best friend, you’d be tempted more than once to take by the shoulders, shake a little, and ask, “What are you doing?” We’ve probably all known someone like Elsie --- smart, often lost in her own thoughts, unsure who she wants to be or what kind of life she wants to live, frequently maddeningly indecisive and prone to poor decisions. At one point, Elsie describes herself as “the quintessential twenty-first-century narrator: characterized by the aimless bustle of the sharp mind, revealed through thoughts about my inner torment rather than events that explain the torment.”

It’s true that on the surface of things, Elsie doesn’t really have much to complain about; sure, her parents split up when she was a kid, but that was a long time ago. She grew up in western Massachusetts, did well in her classes and on her SATs, but ultimately decided to chuck any college plans in favor of spending a year in France, funded by her father’s seemingly endless inheritance, which he continues to pass along to her (this fatherly largess is a common theme throughout the novel and is, in many ways, what enables the plot to progress as it does). There she drank a lot, had sex with strangers, and embarked on a project to translate a long French novel about stray cats into English, just because no one had done so previously.

"People who come to WRECK AND ORDER for a tidy narrative, one that illustrates growth and change and a gesture toward a happy ending, are likely to be disappointed. But many readers will be sympathetic to Elsie, despite her many flaws and self-defeating behaviors..."

Her year in France over, Elsie finds herself in a coastal town outside Los Angeles, where she falls in with a small-time drug dealer named Jared, who is alternately doting and abusive to her, and also holds down a job writing obituaries for the local newspaper. When her relationship with Jared gets just a little too rocky, she flees --- to Brooklyn, where she is tempted to adopt a far more conventional romance with a stable (but also pretty boring) man, and to Sri Lanka, whose Buddhist culture and recent history of war appeal to her.

It would have been easier, one imagines, for author Hannah Tennant-Moore to make Elsie’s narrative a tidier one --- to illustrate her finding enlightenment and inner peace in the East. But Elsie isn’t that simple, and her chronic inability to square the kind of life she imagines for herself with the kinds of thoughts and desires that inhabit her constantly zooming mind means that inner peace is elusive at best. Elsie is obsessed with sex, finding satisfaction primarily in the power she holds over men when they are at their most vulnerable, and her desire for Jared means that she is constantly circling back to patterns of behavior that ultimately will hold her back.

People who come to WRECK AND ORDER for a tidy narrative, one that illustrates growth and change and a gesture toward a happy ending, are likely to be disappointed. But many readers will be sympathetic to Elsie, despite her many flaws and self-defeating behaviors, and they will identify with her intermittent recognition of “that other version of myself, the young woman who knew her purpose, knew it wasn’t much, knew this smallness was something to be grateful for.”